PERFORMANCE PLATFORM

About

Performance Platform is a website and web app listing public activities from five different organisations based in Amsterdam: Dasarts, If I Can't Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, NBprojects, School for New Dance Development (SNDO) and Veem House for Performance. In addition, Performance Platform calls attention to other performance-related events in the city and abroad.

Performance Platform is an entirely subjective, while broadly oriented mapping of the performance landscape. Besides being a user-friendly list serve, the platform aims to highlight pathways through the city, facilitating new discoveries across the various institutions where (performing) arts take place. Far from attempting an all-encompassing survey of the field, the platform’s organisers include information concerning performance-related activities that have captured our imagination: mainly in Amsterdam—to strengthen the local scene—but also elsewhere in the world.

Every month, the five partners come together to discuss preferred landmarks within Amsterdam’s performance field, unfamiliar artists, or events that arouse curiosity. We draw attention to the things that are already here, close-by, but which are perhaps overlooked, inconspicuous or as yet unnoticed. We don’t shy away from ‘big and famous’ either. Every month a new landscape of artistic activity arises—full of not-yet-visible links and possible interconnections, new perspectives, viewpoints and secret gardens.

Those who subscribe to the Performance Platform, get a monthly Letter in their inbox. The goal of this Letter is not to inform, nor to bring any 'news'. Until 2016, each month, in a rotating manner, Barbara Van Lindt, Anne Breure, Nicole Beutler, Frédérique Bergholtz and Bojana Mladenovic, have been presenting the platform’s readership with topics, ideas or people connected to their most current interest. In 2016, a new editorial board composed of Isobel Dryburgh, Maria Rößler, Marjolein Vogels, Annick Kleizen and Simon Asencio was invited to bring in their diversely informed perspectives and to continue the momentum initiated by the five ladies who artistically lead the Performance Platform’s constitutive organisations. Sometimes staying as close as to articulating excitement or concern from the life of the organisations, at other times drawing attention to complex and elaborate projects of others, the editorial board also occasionally extends the invitation to a guest to speak on its behalf.

Each Letter marks a point in time in which the thoughts and ideas on or around performance situate themselves rather freely in poetic, semi- or non-academic, invigorating, careless, engaged, frivolous and pertinent performance discourses at once.

The history and traditions of performance lie in the twentieth century. Today, this provides references, concepts, presentation modes, curatorial models, theoretical and philosophical ideas that infuse life in many different scenes. For us—a venue and production house, a dance company, a visual arts institute, a Bachelor Studies for Choreography and a training programme for Masters of Theatre—approaching the arts from a disciplinary angle does not correspond to the way we work, think and talk. Performance allows another perspective: less sticking to orthodoxy within disciplines, more addressing qualities of presence, the experience of an event, and the politics of show and tell.

English is the language most used in this international community and is therefore the one we have chosen to carry the Performance Platform contents.

HET VEEM THEATER

Filled with voices during the year; old and new, young and established, coming from the arts and beyond, coming from Amsterdam and abroad. Always exploring what performance can and should be in movement, time, and discourse; questioning what we take as given, performing new proposals for ways of looking, and taking us on journeys to unknown worlds. Veem stands as a house for performance, dance, and discourse for making and presenting radical, daring, and experimental work.

We do this by producing and presenting performances on the cross-disciplinary field of dance, theatre, visual arts, cinematography, and music from new makers and by inviting work of international influential artists.
We do this in connections with schools and institutions with whom we share fascinations and this field. (i.a. SNDO, Mime, Amsterdam Master of Choreography and DasArts; Stedelijk Museum, SPRING, ICK, Oude Kerk, Nieuwe Grond – Theater Festival)
We do this in discourse by organising exchanges of thought, booklaunches, debates and salons.
We do this in going outside and working at, and with, other spaces and places.
We do this with you – the audience, artists, and all curious minds out there. The doors are open! Be welcome.

IF I CAN'T DANCE

If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution is an association dedicated to exploring the evolution and typology of performance and performativity in contemporary art. If I Can’t Dance initiates, produces and presents projects with artists, curators and researchers on the basis of long-term collaborations. These projects are presented (inter)nationally through a network of partner institutions.

If I Can’t Dance works along the systematic of collaboration. It doesn’t have a ‘house’, but instead produces projects and programmes that have different manifestations in different institutions within the Netherlands and abroad. One of our networks is Corpus, a European consortium for performance production including the partners Tate Modern and Playground Festival (STUK, Museum M).

If I Can’t Dance’s programme is structured in two-year editions, comprising of artist commissions, research commissions, as well as discursive activities including a monthly reading group. Each edition, defined by a certain field of investigation, engages a group of associated practitioners and institutional partners and unfolds along a travelling trajectory. Previous editions examined theatricality (Edition I), feminism (Edition II) masquerade (Edition III), affect (Edition IV), and appropriation in conjunction with dedication (Edition V) in contemporary visual art.

For Edition VI (2015–2016), If I Can’t Dance takes the notions of ‘Event and Duration’ as the field of research for its biannual programme of Commissions, Performance in Residence projects, reading groups, seminars and workshops. The programme of Commissions includes the production and presentation of new work by artists Leonor Antunes, Alex Martinis Roe, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, and Joke Robaard. If I Can’t Dance also continues its Performance in Residence programme, approaching performance-related practice through production-led research, with four new projects by Erin Alexa Freedman and Lili Huston-Herterich, Fred Moten and Wu Tsang, Peter Pál Pelbart, and Vivian Ziherl.

Since its inception in 2005, If I Can't Dance explores performance practice in visual art, set within the wider scope of both stage arts and feminism. Our relationships with practitioners to this day are informed by our ongoing interest in current and past theatre and dance practices and the manifestations of feminist discourse in art production.

The programme of If I Can’t Dance is supported by the Mondriaan Fund, the Cultural Programme of the European Union (Corpus) and the municipality of Amsterdam.

NBPROJECTS

NBprojects is a vehicle for the artistic and curatorial projects of choreographer Nicole Beutler and her associates.

NBprojects is motivated by the desire to find, and propose, alternatives to fixed ideologies. It seeks to articulate the instability of the rational, create conditions for encounters and reflection within an artistic practice that naturally goes beyond the borders of constructed disciplines such as theatre, visual art, music, dance and performance. This motivation leads to performance/ dance/ theatre projects, to various forms of cross-disciplinary collaborations, as well as to the curating of conferences, lectures, festivals and the annual summer academy: WE LIVE HERE.

Nicole Beutler studied Fine Arts in Germany and Dance and Choreography at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO), part of the Amsterdam Theatre School. Parallel to creating dance/performance pieces, she was a member of the theatre-maker’s collective LISA. After five years of existence as discursive framework and production platform, LISA came to an end. Nicole set up her own organisation: NBprojects. Propelled by the fundamental desire to ‘bring people together’, with NBprojects she continues the search for links and connections across the field and beyond.

NBprojects is joining the Performance Platform in order to expose existing artistic pathways across the city of Amsterdam and beyond its borders, to mark a landscape of affinities and potential connections and to relate individual practices to the larger context.

DASARTS

DasArts is a master’s degree course within the Theatre School of the Amsterdam School of Arts. The programme is based on eighteen years of experience as an educational, production-based and research-orientated hybrid. Our two-year, question based, residential master’s programme functions as a laboratory and aims to improve the artistic competences of its international students.

Artists studying at DasArts define both their goals and the research methods they plan to adopt. Although the focus is placed on individual development, our main educational strategies are derived from the learning potential of encounters: significant collisions with peers, guest teachers and staff and the fostering of professional intimacy. In other words, the degree to which you are able to provide insights into your working processes to a group of colleagues and/or an audience (often comprised of professionals).

DasArts is an acknowledged master of theatre. Theatre is the backdrop: its history and conventions, the traditions and the avant-garde spirit. Performance is part of this legacy. Since this lively contemporary international scene of practitioners and theoreticians creates a cross-cultural critical environment, DasArts consciously brings it into its program: via guest teachers, advisors or mentors, the students themselves, or the books housed in the library.

SNDO

The SNDO—School for New Dance Development (School voor Nieuwe Dansontwikkeling in Dutch)—offers a full time four-year professional education course leading to a bachelor's degree in Art – Choreography. The school was founded in 1975 as an attempt to find new directions for dance next to the existing forms and styles that dominated the field. After forty years, the SNDO remains inquisitive, open minded, and in the foreground of progressive developments in the fields of dance and performance. In the curriculum, the school establishes the conditions from which the creativity of the student can emerge. Reflection on the specific qualities of dance and performance as art forms is developed, and awareness of the body and the artistic implications of working with it take precedence.

The SNDO has built an international reputation and has students from more than forty different countries. The staff and guest teachers are also international, and courses are taught in English. This international reputation, its strong image (inevitably followed by some myths!), and its excellent pool of alumni, all continue to contribute to its development and renewal, challenging and expanding upon established ways of making choreographies and performances. It is only possible to achieve this through the combination of an articulate vision on art, society, and education, and the translation of this vision into the school structure and the curriculum. Throughout the years one thing has remained constant—that which is expected from its students, the SNDO poses as a task to itself: continuous critical self-examination, experimentation, renewal, and the contemporaneity and progressiveness of its programme.

Over and above its core curriculum, the SNDO does this through active and critical dialogue with contemporary themes and politics within the profession; stimulating and initiating new developments and research in the area of dance and performance; by offering intensive courses and symposia, and by producing articles that can contribute to further development in the field. The SNDO collaborates with a number of local and international organizations from the fields of dance, performance, visual arts, and education: theatres Frascati and Het Veem, the fine arts institute If I Can’t Dance in Amsterdam and HZT from Berlin.

Like any educational structure, the SNDO is further recognized and enriched by the work of its alumni. Many teachers, dancers, and choreographers work in the international field. Within the large working community names such as Sasha Waltz, Martin Nachbar, Thomas Lehmen, Ivana Müller, or Nicloe Beutler stand as already established and recognized choreographers alongside more recent forces such as Alma Söderberg, Rodrigo Sobarzo de Larraechea, Vincent Riebeek, Florentina Holzinger, Lisa Vereertbrugghen, Simon Tanguy, Marta Ziólek, and Simon Asencio, to name just a few recent graduates.

The SNDO is part of de Theaterschool at the AHK—Amsterdam School of the Arts, and is accredited by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

18–24

Corpus

Linnæus in Tenebris

Naufus Ramírez-Figuero

CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux (FR)

For his first solo show in France, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa taps into science fiction and biotechnology to address a recurrent subject in his sculptural and performative work, namely, the suffering of the land and of the people who farm it. Linnæus in Tenebris, his site-specific installation for the Nave at CAPC, is situated within the historic context of the eighteenth century, a time that still dominates much of Bordeaux’s architectural landscape. His work focuses on an emblematic figure of the Enlightenment, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who created a nomenclature that made it possible to classify most of the living species known at the time.

06–03

Kunstverein Langenhagen

KroOt by KroOt Juurak

Krõõt Juurak and guests

Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany

Estonian artist KroOt Juurak takes over the space and context of Kunstverein Langenhagen. Instead of mediating through objects, she works with other ways of transmission: she communicates through movements, language(s), moods, misunderstandings, assumptions or physical sensations. The exhibition presents performances that are not really performances, artists that may or may not really be artists, performers who may and may not be performing. Each of the works could represent the whole exhibition. In other words: the exhibition is not made up of works, it is in each work.

14–03

Framer Framed

HOME

Marjan Teeuwen, Ezz Al Zanoon, Rawan Mahady

Tolhuistuin

What does it mean to be forced to flee your home and become internally displaced? What is the meaning of the word ‘home’ in the context of war, diaspora, exclusion, and displacement? These questions are central to the exhibition HOME, curated by Meta Knol, with the photographic works of “Destroyed House Gaza” (2016-2017) by Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen, and video blogs made by Palestinian photographer Ezz Al Zanoon (Ezz Al zanoon Photography) and journalist Rawan Mahady. Mahady and Framer Framed organize a series of Skype connections between Gaza and Amsterdam, to take place every Sunday during the exhibition.

17–31

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

Öğüt & Macuga

Goshka Macuga and Ahmet Öğüt

Rotterdam

This exhibition is the result of Witte de With director Defne Ayas’ pairing of two critically engaged artists, Goshka Macuga and Ahmet Öğüt. Both artists’ interests are tied to political and historical contexts, distilled through a variety of media and strategies of representation that include performance, participatory event, sculpture, film, and installation.

The exhibition has several associated events with liks below. http://www.wdw.nl/en/our_program/events/t_amp_macuga_laurie_cluitmans
http://www.wdw.nl/en/our_program/events/t_amp_macuga_binna_choi

01–02

Stedelijk Museum

Performance Alicia Frankovich: Atlas Of The Living World

Alicia Frankovich

Stedelijk Museum

Frankovich’s Atlas of the Living World takes the genre of the nature documentary as its subject, highlighting it as a forum through which we project culturally determined ideologies onto the natural world. The artist queers the nature documentary by sublimating its conventions, creating a live performative exhibition environment created for the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s Teijin Auditorium. Engaging practices related to theater, performance and exhibition-making, Frankovich’s new work choreographs ten performers against a backdrop of an immersive video installation and exhibition props, taking place on three occasions over the course of two days.

06–07

SNDO

SNDO PRESENTS: RUSH-IN. WORKS OF GRADUATING STUDENTS OF HZT BERLIN

HZT graduates

Veem House for Performance

‘’There are things that we know we know, there are things we know we don’t know, there are things we don’t know we know, there are things we don’t know that we don’t know. IT ALL COMES DOWN TO: some shows, 1 installation, 2 nights. Presented and curated by HZT Berlin students Jonas Maria Droste, Forough Fami, Anna Fitoussi, Bella Hager, Grete Šmitaitė and Hanna Kritten Tangsoo.’’ The visit of the HZT graduates in Amsterdam is a part of an exchange program between the SNDO, School for New Dance Development Amsterdam and the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT)

07–31

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

The Ten Murders of Josephine

Rana Hamadeh

Witte de With, Rotterdam (NL)

The Ten Murders of Josephine is an Opera project by artist Rana Hamadeh structured through several evolving iterations. Preceded by a study group, the exhibition will be followed by a theatrical production premiering at Theater Rotterdam (14-15 December, 2017), a publication, and a film. The exhibition is conceived as both the spatial realization of Hamadeh’s libretto, and the ‘factory’ and ‘assembly line’ for the Opera. Drawing broadly on historian Saidiya Hartman and poets NourbeSe Philip and Fred Moten’s writings, Hamadeh approaches the notion of the ‘testimonial’ as a violence not attended to, which materializes – phonically – as a monument to absent speech.

07–08

Kunstverein Amsterdam

What Am I Doing With My Life?

Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson

Kunstverein, Amsterdam (NL)

‘What Am I Doing With My Life?’ is a traveling opera, a rap show and a comic routine combined, that deals with the subjects of (alternative) medicine, general health and death. The map for this touring performance takes on the shape of a body, with each European city on its path representing a different part in need of medical assistance. On Friday September 8 for members only. On Saturday September 9, the performance is followed by a bike ride from Kunstverein to David Bernstein’s opening of ‘Because Most of the Cosmos is Compost (Thinging Part V)’ at P/////AKT.

08

EYE filmmuseum

Opening night Syrian New Waves

Hello Psychaleppo, Avo Kaprealian, Ammar al-Beik

EYE Filmmuseum , Amsterdam

EYE presents the work of a new generation of Syrian filmmakers opposing this online profusion of shocking images and the one-sided picture they paint of their country. Syrian New Waves includes contemplative documentaries that are informed by personal memories and contain references to classic cinema. After the relentless sharing of images it is now time to interpret them. On the opening night the screening of the film Houses without Doors will be live accompaniment by dj/producer Hello Psychaleppo, in the presence of director Avo Kaprealian for a Q&A, after there will be a live set by Hello Psychaleppo, visual art Lost Images by Ammar al-Beik and drinks & snacks by The Syrian Chefs.

11

Nieuwe Grond

GET IT TOGETHER

Lara Staal, Quincy Gario

Stadsschouwburg, Amsterdam

It is done. The era of the infamous diversity debate is over. The problem has been marked and now it is time for action. How do we make sure that the envisioned steps are actually implemented? During New Ground, curator Lara Steel and artist Quinsy Gario organize a meeting in which they present a diversity agenda for the coming season with concrete actions and proposals. Cultural institutions that organized diversity programs last year are invited and asked to present an agenda item. Everyone is welcome, but participation is not without consequences.

12

Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst

An afternoon for enterprising dancers and theatermakers

Amsterdam Fringe Festival and Nineties productions

de Brakke Grond

For enterprising Amsterdam artists and cultural organizations, there are several options (in addition to grants). Cultuur en Ondernemen and the Amsterdam Art Fund offer cultural makers, for example, the Amsterdam Cultural Loan: an advantageous form of borrowing and training. At Voordekunst you can get your funding through crowdfunding. And now these three parties cooperate for an informative afternoon for cultural makers. You learn everything about smarter finance, so you can create an optimal mix of funding forms. This ensures that you make a lasting investment in your company and art practice.

12–29

Arts Santa Monica

Matters of Touch

Ania Nowak

Arts Santa Monica, Level 0, Barcelona (ES)

If, as Anne Carson writes, contact is crisis, how can engagement with touch create embodied ways of thinking and being that elude exclusion and solidification into one identity? How can the movement of pressing close become a strategy for perceiving less noticeable politics occurring on and under the surfaces of our skin? Can I touch you with the bottom of my heart? Matters of Touch is the third of the exhibitions in the annual cycle The more we know about them, the stranger they become that investigates the agency of the object and the role of matter within a new paradigm shift in which the subject is displaced from the centre of the forces of knowledge and makes room for other entities.

14

WOW Amsterdam

Duo Talk

Philomena Essed, Gloria Wekker

WOW, Amsterdam (NL)

Philomena Essed and Gloria Wekker will be in conversation about forgotten histories, colonialism and contemporary racism, in the framework of ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Too?’ a community art project by visual artist and activist Patricia Kaersenhout.

15

Royal Institute of Art

Conference: Curating NoThing

Ivana Bago, Daniel Birnbaum, Dora García, a. o.,

Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (SE)

Today digital technologies produce an omnipresent reality, which takes place to a large extent in virtuality. Artists are not only using digital media as a matter of course, but also thematize the proliferating virtual existences of the economy and social relations in their works. In addition, a turning toward dance and theatre can be observed, which likewise require new curatorial approaches as well as institutional structures and exhibition formats that go beyond the traditional role for performative arts to framing exhibitions with occasional events. What function does the art institution and its collection take on in a world of big data? Do artists still need the exhibition as a format or medium?

21–29

Looiersgracht 60

Imprinted Mater

Aimée Zito Lema

Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam

Focusing on memory as an archive, in this solo show Aimée Zito Lema creates installations that address themes of collective memory and the ways in which history is recorded and remembered. Locating and reprinting forgotten images that reference historical erasure, Zito Lema saturates archival ephemera with new meaning by cropping the images, zooming in on ligaments, garments or architectural features, adding pixels, shifting between digital and analogue processes, and using photographs in both their positive and negative forms. As the images and objects take on new forms in her work—installation, video, performance—the pieces simultaneously act as a commentary on the human practice of archiving and (hi)storytelling.

21–22

If I Can't Dance

its not a thing

keyon gaskin

Dansmakers Podium

If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution presents its seventh biannual programme of artist commissions and research projects that further its dedication to exploring the typology of performance and performativity in contemporary art. Each month—across September, October, November and December—If I Can’t Dance will introduce an artist and a researcher of VII (2017–2018), Social Movement through a series of events at various locations in Amsterdam. The commissioned artists will present an existing work. For the first event in September, keyon gaskin will present their performance its not a thing.

22–23

todaysart

TodaysArt Festival 2017

Ragnar Kjartansson, Jonas Lund, Bogomir Doringer ao

Den Haag (NL)

With experimental works inside classical settings, TodaysArt builds a complex reality that deepens the contrasts between location, time, content, creators, and audience. In light with this year’s curatorial theme on the opacity of algorithmic systems, the festival seeks contradictions, the unexpected, clarity and chaos, and occasionally, a disturbing reality check. A full program announcement including art installations, panels, talks and additional performances will follow over the next weeks.

22

Veem House

100 Day Housewarming

Veem House, Amsterdam

‘… The Future is Dark which is the best thing the Future can be, I think.” – Virginia Woolf

On September 22nd we open the doors of the ‘100 Days House’! We will celebrate it with a straightforward house-warming; with tours through the house, sneak previews of what is to come, a reunion with the audience, the artists, the neighbourhood, and most of all; a party. You are warmly invited!

26

NBprojects

7: TRIPLE MOON

Nicole Beutler

Haarlem (NL)

In 7: TRIPLE MOON – the third and final part of her Bauhaus-trilogy exploring basic geometric shapes, Nicole Beutler takes the triangle as her starting point. In our Western (Christian) culture the triangle and the number three are often charged with a spiritual significance. First and foremost it is a reference to the Holy Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. With the female trinity of the Maiden, Mother and Crone, Nicole offers a pagan female alternative. 7: TRIPLE MOON shows three danced portraits, in which the different stages in the life of a woman are embodied by an ex-ballerina, an experienced performer and a young dancer.

27–01

Kunstencentrum Vooruit

MAKE ME UP BEFORE WE BLOW BLOW

Paul Soileau, Narcissister, Irvin Morazan, a. o.

Vooruit, Ghent (BE)

Make Me Up Before We Blow Blow is a 5-day program that results from a long conversation between Vooruit and guest curator Ron Berry, director of Fusebox Festival (Austin, Texas). The title of the event ironically refers to the act of ‘making up’ in response to today’s explosive political climate. The program is a multi-level exploration of the pitfalls and potentials of masquerade and other creative strategies for the construction and the deconstruction of identities. Inspired by carnivalesque attitudes and artistic creations of alternative personas, Make Me Up Before We Blow Blow expands a temporary space between madness and beauty, elegance and impertinence, resistance and belonging.

28–06

Afrovibes

Afrovibes Festival – Fragile Freedom

Mamela Nyamza, Jay Pather, a. o.

Tolhuistuin, De Balie, Bijlmer Parktheater

Afrovibes shows the dynamic cultural life of Urban Africa. The festival takes place in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag and Rotterdam and brings a diverse programme of performances, theatre, dance, debates and afterparties at a variety of locations. This year’s festival theme is Fragile Freedom. How can we understand each other in these turbulent times? Do we listen to each other? We live in a time of polarization in which freedom of movement and the connection with other people, regardless of color or origin, seem to fade. Freedom and democracy are fragile and exist only in the understanding of the other. Contemporary African and Dutch artists show how they experience our fierce times and how they look at their past and at the future.

29

Veem House

(To) Come and See

Simone Truong

Veem House, Amsterdam

(To) Come and See is a real-time process of working-through the personal and collective eroticism. Five women are claiming the site of the theatre as their playground, their ecosystem. In their play, they touch and gaze, dissolve their identities and charge the space with the unpredictable, oscillating flow of their libido. They are excited, amused, bored, and confidently insecure. Yet, in this process of searching for and indulging in play, they are subjected to a gaze of spectators, who are both accomplices and intruders.

To penetrate the secret of things, you first have to give yourself to them. To get acquainted with a small piece of landscape, I stay under the feet of a tree for hours; that way I underwent the slightest vibration in the sky and every hue of autumn. – Simone de Beauvoir – Une jeune fille rangée

With an opener mind, I re-enter my urban life; gladly replying to emails and happily doing the dishes. I have managed to approach my administration without too much weight on my mind.

My cultural season started with the performance Atlas of the living world by the New Zealand artist Alicia Frankovich, in the auditorium in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. A beautiful, diverse group of performers appeared to be the characters from a nature documentary. The intimate performance shows queerness as a concept in nature. It shows the beauty of the diversity in a species.

I can take on the obligations of my daily life again. That life that I didn’t feel on the mountain nearby Barcelona or on the bike ride to the work of Pierre Huyghe at the Skulptur Projekte in Münster. Losing myself in nature and in abstract forms gives me the headspace to live everyday life. Now, to keep on remembering this before I fall back in that.

1 this and that

There is this and that
This is here –
That is over there.

‘Here’ is the world of this –
‘there’ the world of that.
(This and that are separated.)

20–13

WIELS & Kunstenfestivaldesarts

The Absent Museum. Blueprint for a museum of contemporary art for the capital of Europe

Various artists

WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels

How can artists maintain the tension between globalisation’s paradoxes and history’s turbulences, and their individual sensibilities and voices? In the light of these issues and recent turbulent historical developments, it is striking to see how absent the art museums remain in urgent, public debate. Although museums – especially those devoted to contemporary art – have never been as popular as they are today, they are still notably absent from the public space and their voice goes unheard in the formation of public opinion. Existing works and new productions of about 45 artists will translate and interpret the challenges that museum institutions face today, as well as the communities they inspire.

18–24

Corpus

Linnæus in Tenebris

Naufus Ramírez-Figuero

CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux (FR)

For his first solo show in France, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa taps into science fiction and biotechnology to address a recurrent subject in his sculptural and performative work, namely, the suffering of the land and of the people who farm it. Linnæus in Tenebris, his site-specific installation for the Nave at CAPC, is situated within the historic context of the eighteenth century, a time that still dominates much of Bordeaux’s architectural landscape. His work focuses on an emblematic figure of the Enlightenment, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who created a nomenclature that made it possible to classify most of the living species known at the time.

16–20

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

Cinema Olanda: Platform

Wendelien van Oldenborgh

Rotterdam

Witte de With transforms into an adaptable platform for groups and individuals who have informed Cinema Olanda, artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh and curator Lucy Cotter’s presentation in the Dutch pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale 2017. A series of changing presentations and six weeks of public events will be programmed by Quinsy Gario (Artist, Poet), Charl Landvreugd (Artist, Curator, Writer), Patricia Pisters and Esther Peeren (ASCA, University of Amsterdam), New Urban Collective (Jessica de Abreu, Mitchell Esajas), and First Things First (Katayoun Arian, Louise Autar, Max de Ploeg). See wdw.nl for the full timeline

06–03

Kunstverein Langenhagen

KroOt by KroOt Juurak

Krõõt Juurak and guests

Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany

Estonian artist KroOt Juurak takes over the space and context of Kunstverein Langenhagen. Instead of mediating through objects, she works with other ways of transmission: she communicates through movements, language(s), moods, misunderstandings, assumptions or physical sensations. The exhibition presents performances that are not really performances, artists that may or may not really be artists, performers who may and may not be performing. Each of the works could represent the whole exhibition. In other words: the exhibition is not made up of works, it is in each work.

14–03

Framer Framed

HOME

Marjan Teeuwen, Ezz Al Zanoon, Rawan Mahady

Tolhuistuin

What does it mean to be forced to flee your home and become internally displaced? What is the meaning of the word ‘home’ in the context of war, diaspora, exclusion, and displacement? These questions are central to the exhibition HOME, curated by Meta Knol, with the photographic works of “Destroyed House Gaza” (2016-2017) by Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen, and video blogs made by Palestinian photographer Ezz Al Zanoon (Ezz Al zanoon Photography) and journalist Rawan Mahady. Mahady and Framer Framed organize a series of Skype connections between Gaza and Amsterdam, to take place every Sunday during the exhibition.

17–31

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

Öğüt & Macuga

Goshka Macuga and Ahmet Öğüt

Rotterdam

This exhibition is the result of Witte de With director Defne Ayas’ pairing of two critically engaged artists, Goshka Macuga and Ahmet Öğüt. Both artists’ interests are tied to political and historical contexts, distilled through a variety of media and strategies of representation that include performance, participatory event, sculpture, film, and installation.

The exhibition has several associated events with liks below. http://www.wdw.nl/en/our_program/events/t_amp_macuga_laurie_cluitmans
http://www.wdw.nl/en/our_program/events/t_amp_macuga_binna_choi

05–06

Veem House

Panda Express

Oneka von Schrader

ImPulsTanz, Vienna (At)

A tea ceremony serves as a metaphor in this clever, exciting and profound examination of today’s theatre as a place of promise, enticement, surprise and danger. Three women and one man playfully use objects and actions to open up multi-layered spaces of association. In a mixture of absurdity, self-determination, provocation, humour and natural eroticism, the happening draws the audience into a fresh, relaxed world of representation where unaffected notions of dance, theatre and performance casually develop, redefine themselves and take themselves to the point of absurdity.

06–08

Veem House

Bombyx Mori

Ola Maciejewska

ImPulsTanz, Vienna

In this piece for three dancers, Ola Maciejewska draws her inspiration from Fuller’s Serpentine Dance. She explores the relationship in the arts between human beings and physical matter by creating movement in large pieces of fabric. She plays with the confluence of bodies and objects and the battle that these wage. Bombyx Mori alludes to the silk caterpillar, which has become entirely dependent on human beings for survival. Here, the natural body and the artificial process are inextricably linked: a poignant metaphor for this sculptural interpretation of one of the pioneers of modern dance and performance art.

20

WhyNot and The Tolhuistuin

WhyNot: study for MAGENTA

Giulio D'Anna and more

The Tolhuistuin

Announcing its upcomming festival in October, WhyNot presents study for MAGENTA by Giulio D’Anna, the end result of a series of summer workshops and study for his upcoming work MAGENTA (2019). Together with a group of performers, amateur and professional, he created a choreography in the garden, which represents our universal desire to be together. What happens to our individual identity if we want to use the power of the masses? In addition to study for MAGENTA, WhyNot will present its latest dance film Leave Body Behind this night, next to I-Perform 3.0, an interactive group choreography by Whats App and followed by more performances and delicious food.

17–31

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

Öğüt & Macuga

Goshka Macuga and Ahmet Öğüt

Rotterdam

This exhibition is the result of Witte de With director Defne Ayas’ pairing of two critically engaged artists, Goshka Macuga and Ahmet Öğüt. Both artists’ interests are tied to political and historical contexts, distilled through a variety of media and strategies of representation that include performance, participatory event, sculpture, film, and installation.

The exhibition has several associated events with liks below. http://www.wdw.nl/en/our_program/events/t_amp_macuga_laurie_cluitmans
http://www.wdw.nl/en/our_program/events/t_amp_macuga_binna_choi

07–31

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art

The Ten Murders of Josephine

Rana Hamadeh

Witte de With, Rotterdam (NL)

The Ten Murders of Josephine is an Opera project by artist Rana Hamadeh structured through several evolving iterations. Preceded by a study group, the exhibition will be followed by a theatrical production premiering at Theater Rotterdam (14-15 December, 2017), a publication, and a film. The exhibition is conceived as both the spatial realization of Hamadeh’s libretto, and the ‘factory’ and ‘assembly line’ for the Opera. Drawing broadly on historian Saidiya Hartman and poets NourbeSe Philip and Fred Moten’s writings, Hamadeh approaches the notion of the ‘testimonial’ as a violence not attended to, which materializes – phonically – as a monument to absent speech.

12–29

Arts Santa Monica

Matters of Touch

Ania Nowak

Arts Santa Monica, Level 0, Barcelona (ES)

If, as Anne Carson writes, contact is crisis, how can engagement with touch create embodied ways of thinking and being that elude exclusion and solidification into one identity? How can the movement of pressing close become a strategy for perceiving less noticeable politics occurring on and under the surfaces of our skin? Can I touch you with the bottom of my heart? Matters of Touch is the third of the exhibitions in the annual cycle The more we know about them, the stranger they become that investigates the agency of the object and the role of matter within a new paradigm shift in which the subject is displaced from the centre of the forces of knowledge and makes room for other entities.

21–29

Looiersgracht 60

Imprinted Mater

Aimée Zito Lema

Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam

Focusing on memory as an archive, in this solo show Aimée Zito Lema creates installations that address themes of collective memory and the ways in which history is recorded and remembered. Locating and reprinting forgotten images that reference historical erasure, Zito Lema saturates archival ephemera with new meaning by cropping the images, zooming in on ligaments, garments or architectural features, adding pixels, shifting between digital and analogue processes, and using photographs in both their positive and negative forms. As the images and objects take on new forms in her work—installation, video, performance—the pieces simultaneously act as a commentary on the human practice of archiving and (hi)storytelling.

27–01

Kunstencentrum Vooruit

MAKE ME UP BEFORE WE BLOW BLOW

Paul Soileau, Narcissister, Irvin Morazan, a. o.

Vooruit, Ghent (BE)

Make Me Up Before We Blow Blow is a 5-day program that results from a long conversation between Vooruit and guest curator Ron Berry, director of Fusebox Festival (Austin, Texas). The title of the event ironically refers to the act of ‘making up’ in response to today’s explosive political climate. The program is a multi-level exploration of the pitfalls and potentials of masquerade and other creative strategies for the construction and the deconstruction of identities. Inspired by carnivalesque attitudes and artistic creations of alternative personas, Make Me Up Before We Blow Blow expands a temporary space between madness and beauty, elegance and impertinence, resistance and belonging.

28–06

Afrovibes

Afrovibes Festival – Fragile Freedom

Mamela Nyamza, Jay Pather, a. o.

Tolhuistuin, De Balie, Bijlmer Parktheater

Afrovibes shows the dynamic cultural life of Urban Africa. The festival takes place in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag and Rotterdam and brings a diverse programme of performances, theatre, dance, debates and afterparties at a variety of locations. This year’s festival theme is Fragile Freedom. How can we understand each other in these turbulent times? Do we listen to each other? We live in a time of polarization in which freedom of movement and the connection with other people, regardless of color or origin, seem to fade. Freedom and democracy are fragile and exist only in the understanding of the other. Contemporary African and Dutch artists show how they experience our fierce times and how they look at their past and at the future.